Profiles

A profile contains presentation settings and search scoping configuration for a collection.

A profile can be seen as a subset of a collection containing its own presentation settings
(best bets, curator, synonyms, ...), its own templates and its own analytics. A profile
doesn't have an index and will use the index of the collection it exists on, however the
search results returned from a profile can be scoped down in various ways (usually via
Gscopes).

For example, a university search could be based on a single collection (a crawl of the
university website) but have 2 profiles: A profile for students and a profile for staff members.
The student profile would not include content from the staff pages, whereas the staff profile
may include all crawled content. Both profiles will have their own Analytics, allowing
to distinguish student searches from staff searches.

A profile is usually enabled as a search service
to indicate it is a search endpoint that should be made available on the dashboard. Non-service
profiles will not have access to the dashboard optimisation tools (curator, best bets, ...)
however they can be used for search (with their profile-specific templates) and will record
analytics data.

The profile to use when querying Funnelback can be specified as a URL parameter in
the form ...&profile=<profile>..., e.g. search.html?collection=university&profile=staff.

Default profile

All collections contain a default profile named _default. This profile cannot
be deleted.

When no &profile=... parameter is present in the URL the _default profile will be used.

Profile on-disk storage

In practice profiles are a set of folders inside the collection configuration folder (i.e.
$SEARCH_HOME/conf/<collection>/<profile>/). Each profile has a preview and live view
in order to support publishing of configuration settings. The preview folder is suffixed
with _preview.

For example if the university collection has a student and a staff profile, the following
folders will be present:

$SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/student and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/student_preview

$SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/staff and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/staff_preview

$SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/_default and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/_default_preview for
the default profile.

Managing profiles and services

Profiles can be managed in the administration interface via the administer tab and the
manage profiles link.

From this screen existing profiles can be deleted, and new profiles can be created.

Creating services from the administration interface home page.

Profiles can be enabled as search services by clicking on the create service link
available on the administration interface home page.

Once enabled, the view service in the marketing dashboard link will allow accessing
the profile reports and configuration.

Profile folders availability in the file manager

Permisions are automatically configured for the user that created the profile. This user will be able to view the profile configuration from the file manager. Other users on the system will be unable to access the newly created profile unless appropriate file manager security rules are granted to the user. These need to be added on a per-user basis by an administrator by editing the user's configuration file and adding the appropriate file manager security rules. The rules can be copied from the configuration of the user that created the profile.